Friday, February 8, 2013

Billions of Earth-like alien planets likely reside in our Milky
Way galaxy, and the nearest such world may be just a stone's throw away
in the cosmic scheme of things, a new study reports.

Astronomers
have calculated that 6 percent of the galaxy's 75 billion or so red
dwarfs — stars smaller and dimmer than the Earth's own sun — probably
host habitable, roughly Earth-size planets. That works out to at least
4.5 billion such "alien Earths," the closest of which might be found a mere dozen light-years away, researchers said.

"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet,"
study lead author Courtney Dressing, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement. "Now we realize another
Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted."